


The Rescue

by MundaneExMiscellanea



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, the couple that bleeds together etc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-05-27 18:30:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6295087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MundaneExMiscellanea/pseuds/MundaneExMiscellanea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Cassandra is Trevelyan's knight in shining armor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rescue

They stood all in a row - Varric, Dorian, Cole - like three lost circus performers waiting to ambush a princess in one of Varric’s novels. Cassandra reined her mount to a halt, her lips curling in irritation even as the dwarf smiled.

“What do you want, Varric?” Cassandra asked, her voice flat. She was gratified to see the Tevinter, at least, shift nervously.

“Same as always, Seeker,” Varric said. “I’m here to help.”

“If I needed your help, I would have requested it. Now get out of my way.”

“Let me guess your plan,” he said, holding out his hands. “You’ll go to the Herald’s last known location, all by yourself. Of course whoever took him will be long gone, but you’ll twist a few arms, bloody a few noses, and hope to terrify someone into giving you useful information. Sound familiar?”

Cassandra growled and prepared to ride through them.

“I know a guy,” Varric said, hastily. “He’s been hearing about strange shit happening in the Approach. Green lights flashing out in the desert. Rumors of supply caravans guarded by soldiers with foreign accents and unfamiliar armor.”

“Stop wasting my time, Varric,” Cassandra said. “Do you know where Diony- where Inquisitor Trevelyan is or not?”

“My contact gave me a name, someone supplying the foreigners with fresh produce,” Varric said. “Big fans of fruits and vegetables, the Venatori. Take me with you and you’ll have a location, an estimate of enemy numbers, and, of course, Bianca.” He pat his crossbow affectionately.

“And you’ll have me also.” Cassandra startled. She hated how easy it was to forget Cole was there.

“Kid, I thought we agreed to let me do the talking?” Varric said.

“Cassandra really wants to leave right now,” Cole said. “Her heart is breaking.”

Varric winced, but Cassandra only stared over their heads into the distance.

“Well, far be it from me to stand in the way of true love,” Dorian said. “Let’s be on our way. The mounts are restless.”

“No,” Cassandra said, her focus snapping back to the trio blocking her way. “Give me the name. You will only slow me down.”

“Seeker, I’m not just going to give you the name,” Varric said. “I’ve seen your interrogation methods, and they lead to embellishment.”

“What Varric means to say,” Dorian said, as Cassandra’s eyes narrowed, “is that, accompanied by two of the most charming men in Thedas and a young man who can actually read minds, we can have the Inquisitor’s location before the contact even knows they’re being questioned. And if Trevelyan really has been captured by the Venatori, then you’ll need our help to rescue him, will you not?”

“You find me charming, Sparkler?” Varric said. “I’m touched.”

“We really want to help,” Cole said.

Cassandra glared at them. A known liar, a Tevinter mage, and a demon in the shape of a boy. They were not who she would have chosen to mount a rescue. But Dionysus? He had trusted each of them with his life, had risked that same life for theirs on many occasions, argued with her on their behalves. And if she could not trust the judgement of the man she loved, what could she trust? Only that the Maker would let her choice be the correct one.

“Cassandra,” Varric said. “Let us help.”

She sighed, and closed her eyes to Varric’s grin as Dorian and Cole retrieved their mounts from the treeline.

“Really, Cole? The Wild Hart?” she heard Dorian say.

“She likes me,” Cole said. “Her name is Pearl.”

“Ugh,” Cassandra said.

 

Cassandra’s sword broke on a Venatori helmet before they’d made it halfway across the courtyard of the crumbling keep, and she had to use her shield as a bludgeon until she could steal a blade from one of the fallen. Cole ran in and out of the fray, on the edges of perception, occasionally materializing behind an unfortunate Tevinter spellcaster. Small fires burned in their wake as Dorian and Varric rained missiles and pyrotechnics on the swarming guards.

“I could do this all day,” Dorian laughed.

“So you keep saying,” Varric retorted.

Cassandra held the zealots at bay as Cole rushed up the stairs to the tower door, Varric and Dorian following closely behind.  

“Cole!” Dorian shouted, as Varric cried “Kid!”

Cassandra turned in time to see Cole plummet to the courtyard from the landing. An elf emerged from the doorway, slight frame pulsing with veins of lyrium, hair shocked white, fists alight with magic. He turned his dark eyes on Dorian, and they flared bright with anger.

“Death to the masters,” he said, in a low voice.

As he swung his fist, Dorian fadestepped, skidding back to reality and nearly falling off the far side of the landing.

“Fenris?” Varric said. The elf turned as he spoke, and Cassandra could see that it was definitely not Fenris. The strange elf raised his hand for another strike.

“Switch!” Cassandra shouted, and Varric pivoted on the stair, the Seeker spinning behind him to lash out at the lyrium elf with her shield while Varric launched a high impact bolt into the Venatori at the foot the stairs, scattering them.

The elf glared down at her, his fists crackling with energy. Cassandra advanced up the stairs, sword ready, but the elf attacked first.

She got her shield up in time, but the lyrium-etched fist seemed to pass right through. She felt the crunch of metal against bone, but over her own shout of pain she heard panicked screaming. The elf’s menacing glare had been reduced to pure panic, batting at terrors only he could see. The screaming only stopped when a knife appeared in his neck. In the distraction, Cassandra thrust her sword under the elf's arm, into the ribs. As he slumped, she could see Cole, and above him, Dorian.

"Seeker Cassandra, are you hurt?" Dorian called.

"Yes," Cole said, but quietly.

"I'm fine," Cassandra said. Her shield arm was definitely broken, probably quite badly. She could feel blood trickling into her gauntlet. "Help Varric."

Dorian turned his attention to erecting walls of flame and prisons of lightning around the Venatori trying to follow them up the stairs. Cole held her gaze for a moment, then turned to let her pass.

"He is at the top," Cole said. "Take the left stair. Hurry. She's becoming impatient."

"She?" Cassandra asked, and heard a distant scream and the now familiar crackle of the Inquisitor's Mark. She rushed past Cole and hurried inside.

   

With one kick, the old wooden door fell into the room beyond.

Trevelyan lay strapped to a table, bleeding but apparently conscious. His Mark flared and crackled, casting shadows across his captor, a mage with pale blonde hair bound into a tight bun behind her head.

"Seeker Pentaghast," said the woman. "I have to admit, when the Inquisitor said you would come for him, I did not think it would be so quickly. Or that you would be alone."

"I’m not," Cassandra said, cautiously stepping into the room. As long as she held her shield close against her body, the pain jolting through her arm wouldn’t make her faint. "Our own Tevinter mage is burning your Venatori alive with unseemly relish."

"Dorian is here?" Dionysus said. "That's sweet of him."

"Hush, darling," she said. The rasp in his voice made her heart hurt. "Who are you, Tevinter?"

"You may call me Calpernia," the mage said. "I am the Vessel of the Elder One, herald of Tevinter's return to glory."

"I had thought that honor belonged to Samson after the failure of the Venatori at Redcliffe."

"Alexius was a sentimental fool," Calpernia said. "And Samson is a wretched-"

A loud scream interrupted her, as a blazing archer fell past the window, and Calpernia turned, just slightly, toward the noise. In the moment Cassandra lunged, she became aware of a faint blur of rapid motion. Her armor again proved useless. The pain was brilliant.

Cassandra struggled to push past the pain, the feeling of blood running from her side too quickly, the abrupt feeling of fever. She could see Dionysus straining to free himself in her peripheral vision, but she had to push past that as well. She adjusted her stance, trying to keep track of her attacker, another lyrium-scarred elf, skin alive with magic. Blades extended from the elf’s hands, which glowed with that eerie lyrium light. Calpernia took the opportunity to fetch her staff, but neither she nor her apparent bodyguard were in much of a hurry to engage.

“It’s in vogue among the magisters to turn valued elven slaves into living weapons,” Calpernia said. Her dragon-headed staff crackled with electricity. “Slaves are just tools to the masters. Why not modify them, change them, make something more of them? But we have always been more. We are not things to be altered on a whim. Together, we will give them cause for deep regret.”

Cassandra slashed and pivoted, trying to keep the elf from flanking her.

“Are you not still a tool, Calpernia?” Cassandra asked. “What makes you any different from a ‘valued slave’ to your Elder One?”

Before she could react, lightning struck Cassandra’s shield, and she screamed as her arm spasmed. The elf moved, and then both of her luminous blades were dripping blood.

Dionysus shouted her name, but Cassandra heard him only distantly. Blood soaked under her armor, and the elf circled, waiting for her to weaken from the blood loss perhaps. Calpernia gestured casually, and a magical barrier rose around the Tevinter mage and her servant.

“Corypheus is, or shall be, a god,” Calpernia said, turning to look out the window at the Blighted land beyond the walls. “And as his ally, I shall be rewarded with a share of his power, with which to remake the Tevinter Imperium, and lead it back to glory.”

“Maker, give me strength,” Cassandra whispered, winding up a strike. “Maker, preserve us and guide our hands.”

The elf dodged the thrust of her blade without effort, but contact was not her goal. Light blazed from the point of her sword and passed as a wave through the room, shattering magical barriers, dispelling the elf’s shroud and leeching the glow from her fists, leaving both mage and assassin staggered.

“In Andraste’s holy name, I will cast you down,” Cassandra said. Cassandra swept aside the punch daggers with her sword, focusing on the Chant to quell the shrieking in her mind, in the defiant words she forced herself to speak. “The Imperium’s reign is long over. It will never rise again.” One of the elf’s blades snapped, and although she rolled and struck again, rapidly, repeatedly, her blows glanced off Cassandra’s armor.

“Whoever you are, whatever justification you think you have,” Cassandra said, driving the elf back. “I will not allow a mage from Tevinter to bring another doom upon the world.”

Cassandra’s next blow slashed through her opponent's wrist. The elf had a moment to glance at the Seeker with shock before Cassandra’s blade pierced her throat.

Calpernia's eyes shifted from Cassandra approaching to the lyrium assassin collapsing to the floor. She glanced at Trevelyan, still struggling against his chains. With a tremendous wall of force, she smashed the Inquisitor and his table into the floor and hurtled backward through the window. She hovered in the air a moment, sparing Cassandra a smile before she fell out of sight.

Dyonisius struggled to pull himself from the wreckage of the table and Cassandra rushed to his side. Together they stood at the tower window. Calpernia was nowhere to be seen.

"Sorry," he said. "She got away."

"Don't be ridiculous," Cassandra said. Then she pulled him close.

"I thought I'd lost you," she said.

"You found me," he said.

"I'm so sorry," Cassandra said. "I should have moved more quickly, been more..."

"Have I been gone that long?" Dionysus said, smiling. “By my count, it’s only been a few days.”

She looked down, struggling with embarrassment, then back to his face. "It felt like much longer."

His lips were cracked and dry, but she met them tenderly, and released him only with reluctance. She winced as his hands brushed her wounds.

"We need to get you out of this armor so I can take a look at you," Dionysus said.

"You are always looking for excuses to undress me," Cassandra said, her voice, like his, barely above a murmur. "Even in the most inappropriate situations."

“Can you blame me?”

“Yes.” She wanted to laugh, but it hurt too much.

They leaned on each other, each too weak to do more than be there, listening to the fading sounds of battle, feeling the warmth of a sun descending but still bright in the sky.

“Whatever may happen,” Cassandra said. “I will always come for you.”

“I know, my love,” Dionysus said. “I never doubted it.”

At the sound of steps in the hall, Cassandra raised her sword. She felt a chill as frost crept over Trevelyan's hand. Then Varric stepped into the room, supporting a stumbling and battered Dorian. Both were bleeding from numerous cuts and abrasions, as well as some minor burns. When they smiled, their teeth were dull with blood.

“They’re in here, kid,” Varric called.

“I know,” Cole said, kneeling beside the lyrium elf and closing the dead woman’s eyes. The spirit staggered as he rose to his feet, limping to join the others. One of his eyes was swollen shut and blood ran from his nose to his chin.

“Good to see you,” Dionysus said.

“Wish I could say the same,” Dorian said. “You look terrible.”

“It’s not my fault,” Dionysus said. “The other mage could fly.”

Varric sagged and Cole snatched him upright. The three rescuers seemed to be standing only with each other’s support.

Cassandra reached behind her and retrieved a bottle from her belt.

“I have one of the herbalist’s regenerative draughts,” she said. “If the most gravely wounded person-”

“That would be you, love,” Dionysus said. Cassandra scowled.

“I’ve been told that those standing closest to the person who drinks it receive some of its benefits.” Cassandra frowned. “Though I’m not sure how.”

“Seeker, are you suggesting a group hug?” Varric said.

“Absolutely not.”

“I have a healing mist in a jar,” Cole said, holding up a glass. “It works best if we’re close together.”

“I think that’s grounds for a group hug,” Dionysus said.

“Yaaaay,” Cole said and broke the glass.

“You could have just opened it, Kid,” Varric said, as the five huddled together over the rising vapors. “We’ve got time.”

“I’m sorry,” Cole said. “I was excited.”

Cassandra shook her head and drank her potion. Dionysus wrapped his arms around her, the others leaning on him and each other. Green-tinted mists rose all around them. Dionysus made a contented sound and nuzzled the Seeker's neck.

“Ugh,” Cassandra said. “Why did I even rescue you.”

“Because I’m handsome,” Dionysus said. “And charming. And I adore you.”

Cassandra turned her head against his, hiding the flush in her cheeks.

“He helps the hurt,” Cole whispered excitedly.

“Actually, I think that’s the potion,” Dorian said. “Although I suppose it’s possible the Lady Cassandra naturally emits an aroma of elfroot and the sea.”

“It’s very soothing,” Varric said.

“Enough,” Cassandra said, shrugging against the encircling arms. “Let’s return to camp. The Inquisition must know that its leader is safe.”

With a great show of reluctance, Varric and Dorian left the huddle. Cole looked at Cassandra and Dionysus and almost smiled, before vanishing down the stairs.

“You could do this all day, huh,” they heard Varric say.

“Well, the sun is setting,” Dorian said. “So technically, I have.”

Cassandra kissed Dionysus again.

“You may have to carry me,” he said.

“What else is new,” Cassandra said. The Inquisitor laughed.  

With relief, they took each other's weight and made their way down the stairs.


End file.
